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Many things separate the kingdoms of animal and plant. One of them, we might suppose, is pain. Humans — along with all other nerve-endowed organisms — experience damage to their bodies as subjectively unpleasant. Plants are just as prone to injury, of course, and they respond to injury in their own way. But we feel the stabs and aches in a way they presumably don't.
Lacking the brain and nervous system needed to conjure consciousness (not to mention nociceptors, the animalian cells that react to painful stimuli), our vegetal cousins endure munching insects and withering drought without a hint of suffering as we know it. Even clear-cutting of entire forests, as devastating as it is to the overall ecosystem, won't bother an individual tree in the slightest. Weeding the garden is not botanical torture, and vegetarians can rest easy in the knowledge that their salads are cruelty-free.
That said, plants — like every form of life — have evolved tools to avoid and mitigate damage to themselves. Over the past few decades, biologists have learned much about their
astonishing ability to sense and react to danger in their environments. Easy as it is to imagine ourselves in their roots, though, we must remember the immense physiological gap between humans and plants. "We anthropomorphize so readily, and that's why we use the word 'pain'," says Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh, a professor of biology at the University of Washington. "But it's not appropriate to apply to a similar response in plants."
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